Over the past couple of years, there have been moves to convince the Scottish Government to make St Andrews Day a public holiday to celebrate our country in much the same way as the Irish do with St Patrick’s Day. Yesterday, there was an announcement that employees of the Scottish Govt would be allowed to take it as a holiday if they wanted. At the moment, I’m not sure how that fits in with the Court Service and whether it means the holiday has to come out of our annual leave entitlement or not. Part of me thinks it would be a great idea to use the day to promote Scotland to the world as at the moment the day is largely ignored.

It’s much more bearable to me than the idea Westminster has to have a national holiday to celebrate British patriotism in much the same way as the Americans have the Fourth of July. They even want us to swear allegiance to the Queen in the same way as the Americans do in classrooms and such! As you can imagine, the idea has been met with great deal of derision and laughter. The truth is many in our country do not feel they are part of one united Britain and, good or bad, I certainly consider myself a Scot first and foremost. If I’m going to be flying any flag from my front porch, it would be the Saltire long before the Union Jack.

I’m not saying there is anything wrong with feeling patriotic and I’m sure our country could probably do with a large dose of it but do we really need to copy the Americans? The only time we seem to get patriotic in this country is to get behind our football team and then the flags start flying out of windows and streaming from car aerials but we are not all football fanatics.

So, my dilemma is I love Scotland but I feel nothing for Britain.

I went to see Calamity Jane at the Kings Theatre in Glasgow last night and was really disappointed. The cast just didn’t seem to gel together at all and some were just downright awful. The lead actress was quite good in the role of Calamity and the singer playing Wild Bill was a great singer but he was overweight and hardly handsome. First rule of theatre: romantic leads have to be droolworthy or the illusion is completely lost.

The rest of the cast were actually quite old and the expression “mutton dressed as lamb” came to mind when you saw the showgirls. Don’t even get me started on the costumes - they were downright cheap. The Kings isn’t exactly the West End but generally they don’t have productions as amateur as this one.

I’m completely and utterly done in. It’s been a tough week at work and as expected my workload has increased so much I don’t have time to do the things that are part of my actual job. I feel like I’m in the middle of a major storm and everything is blowing around me in chaos. This afternoon, I just thought enough is enough and left early because I was close to tears and did not want to embarrass myself that way. I have to put up with this for another two months at the least - maybe longer.

I have a half day tomorrow and am going to the theatre tomorrow night so I’m just going to take it easy. Then I only have two working days next week before taking time off for Easter. Bring it on!

I got into work this morning and discovered my “partner in crime” managed to break her wrist after falling during an aerobics class which just totally proves to me that any form of exercise is dangerous! Seriously, it sounds like she has really given herself a sore one and had to have surgery this afternoon.

She’ll probably be off work for weeks now and it totally leaves me in the shit since I’m the only one who can do most of her work. We also have a lot of staff in our team taking holidays this month which is going to add an additional strain since we won’t get any help from other departments. I feel like crying already. My life would be so much easier if people, especially social workers and lawyers, learned how to do their jobs properly and stopped complaining about the length of time we are taking. Hello? Stop calling us and we’ll get peace to do some work!

Honestly, I love technology but we seem to have the crappiest phone system on the planet at work and some days it drives me insane. I actually had a mini meltdown last Friday and complained about all the personal calls I was having to deal with on a daily basis. We are dealing with so many other queries, by phone or in person, I just don’t have time to pass on personal messages. Fortunately, my boss agreed with me and is tackling the issue.

Anyway, now that I’m done moaning (again!), i’m off to have a hot shower to see if it will bring some colour back to my toes. So far March has been bitterly cold with a swing back to winter again with snow! We didn’t get any though.